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Dedicated to Austrian-Hungarian Burgenland Family History

Ancestry.com also offers a free image viewer (see http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2442), however, you must sign up for a free account in order to see the images.



This brings us back to the question of EDs (Enumeration Districts). An enumeration district is an area that could be canvassed by a single census taker (enumerator) during the census period. EDs have been in use since the 1880 census, though you may not know that since most census image collections and indexes have been restructured into friendlier formats (counties, townships, cities, wards in cities, etc.) for easy viewing. But, until that restructuring is done for the 1940 census, you need the ED number.

Each enumeration district within a state has a unique number. In 1940, the number consists of two parts, such as 31-78. The first part is a prefix number assigned to a county (usually alphabetical) and the second part is a district number within the county. Some larger cities have their own prefix number and such city prefix numbers come after the last county prefix.

Most rural townships only have one or two EDs, so browsing those is no problem. However, if you are looking for someone who lived in a large city and you don't know their address, you are not going to be able to find the correct ED... your only real option is to browse all of the EDs for the city and all of the pages in each of those EDs... and since there are only 40 people per page, you are talking about 100 pages for a village of 4,000 residents, 1,000 pages for a town of 40,000, 10,000 pages for a city of 400,000, etc. The other option is to wait for the indexes to be completed.

One of the easiest ways to find ED numbers, assuming you know enough of an address to do so, is to use Steve Morse's One-Step Tool called the Unified 1940 Census ED Finder at http://stevemorse.org/census/unified.html. To use it, you enter the State, County, Town (city or township), and (if a city) the street and house number. The Finder will show the ED number(s) at the bottom of the page. Click the ED number (there may be more than one) and the Finder will pop up a new page allowing you to select a viewer from the group I mentioned above (however, the address built in for Ancestry.com appears to be incorrect... Ancestry must have moved its page). Personally, I'd use the LDS FamilySearch viewer, as it seems to have the easiest and best interface (but feel free to try the others; you may disagree with my humble opinion plus it will put less load on my preferred viewer!).



A couple of considerations in choosing a viewer are download speeds and image quality. Not surprisingly, these two are inversely related, as both depend on the size of the underlying image... bigger images are clearer but take longer to download, while smaller images download quickly but are not as clear. Most of the websites above have altered the original images to improve both download speed and quality, and they have chosen slightly different ways to present their results, though the apparent effectiveness of the "improvements" and presentation depend on your personal views (you saw my choice listed above).

Margaret Kaiser shared some technical results with me that she found in The Ancestry Insider. See the full article at that website, though I'll present two excerpts here.

First, their evaluation of changes to the images, with resulting file sizes and download speeds:

I will note that I have used the FamilySearch.org viewer for a number of hours and found typical download speeds to be on the order of 3-5 seconds per image on my home computer, so I cannot confirm the times noted above. One would expect them to be directly relative to size, with smaller sizes loading faster. I'll also comment that an image that is too small to read is useless, so speed is not everything.

Second, they show identical sections of an image, so you can see the image quality when displayed side-by-side (...and decide for yourself which is best):





A noted problem of the underlying original images is that the focus was poor, either when originally microfilmed or when digitized (attempts to fix this focus problem underlies the alterations made by the various websites). Probably the best source for clear images of the census form headers is: http://www.archives.gov/research/census/1940/1940.pdf. It is well worth the time to read the headers and absorb what is there before you start browsing pages. One thing I had not seen from previous censuses is that the street and house number (for city dwellers) is recorded. Another thing is that two people on each page have expanded questions at the bottom of the page; be sure to check to see if they are your people. Also, note that "call backs" (people missed on the first canvas of a neighborhood) are at the end of the ED pages; be sure to check these pages if you don't find your person.



A last thought: As noted above, there are a number of indexing projects underway. You might consider offering your services as an indexer to speed the process. See the links above to learn about what is involved (those sites that welcome volunteers have links that explain the process).

Additional Information

(Ed: Previously published in the BB Newsletter were two short articles by Hannes that relate directly to this article; we reprint them below.)

THE SPRING OF ST. BARTHOLOMÄUS IN ILLMITZ
(from BB Newsletter No. 186A, April 30, 2009)

The unhygienic drinking water of the shallow house wells in Illmitz was the reason for the annual summer sickness of the whole population. Also, typhus sometimes affected the village. The water had a very high concentration of calcium (1200 mg/l) and nitrate (1500 mg/l). In comparison, the Viennese water currently has a maximum of 8 mg/l! For this reason, the mayor of Illmitz chartered a drilling team in 1929 that would search for fresh water. They found an artesian spring and established a spring house where everybody could come to take the water they needed. The mineral water is named "Arteserwasser," and has been available for free since 1931. As a result, now the population is largely free of sickness and cancer. (I always take some bottles with me to take some water back to Vienna. It's really good for the kidneys & prostate.) The spring of St. Bartholomäus is a "Natrium-Hydrogencarbonat-Mineral-Trinksäuerling" (sodium bicarbonate mineral drinking water) with a constant temperature of 15.6° Celsius (60.1° Fahrenheit), at 201.3 meters below ground. In 1996, the Burgenland Government declared it to be a Heilquelle (mineral/medicinal spring / health spa). Since then, other drillings show that the largest European mineral water lake is under the Lake Corner, with a total area of about 250 square kilometers, equal to 96.53 square miles.

LAKE NEUSIEDL-SEEWINKEL NATIONAL PARK
(from BB Newsletter No. 186A, April 30, 2009)

This steppe national park, which crosses international borders, was established in 1993. Part of its territory belongs to Austria (100 km², or 38.61 square miles) and part to Hungary (150 km², or 57.92 square miles). The park ranks among the most fascinating natural areas of Europe: the open water and reed-covered zones of Lake Neusiedl, the meadows close to the water, the pasture land, and the saline and periodically-dry pools are the habitats that this park has to offer. See it's English-language website: www.nationalpark-neusiedlersee-seewinkel.at/en/.

"...describes or defines the set of symbols used in writing a language, and the rules about how to use those symbols... (it) is largely concerned with matters of spelling, and in particular the relationship between phonemes and graphemes in a language."

(Actually, things like hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation are also considered part of orthography... but they are not relevant to the current discussion.)

What is especially relevant, though, are those words phonemes and graphemes... A phoneme is defined as "the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances." A grapheme is "the smallest semantically distinguishing unit in a written language."

Said simpler, a phoneme is what you say and a grapheme is how you write it. However, a real problem occurs when we have an utterance in one language and wish to write it in another language (which occurs frequently in our multi-ethnic world of emigrants from Burgenland, as we commonly convert names amongst the German, Hungarian, Croatian and English languages).

Why is this a problem? Largely, for three reasons...

1) spoken languages do not have a single, identical set of phonemes (i.e., we don't make a common set of sounds when we speak);
2) written languages are not composed of a single, identical set of graphemes (i.e., we don't use the same symbols to write what we speak); and
3) the same grapheme may represent a different phoneme depending on which language is involved (i.e., the common written letters have different sounds in different languages). Worse yet, even in a specific language, a single grapheme can represent different phonemes and a single phoneme can represent different graphemes!

To describe these issues, let me introduce the standard notation used in orthography. A grapheme (either a single character or a collection of characters that represents the written form of a particular utterance) is typically enclosed in angle brackets: ⟨f⟩, whereas, the phoneme (either a single character or a collection of characters that represents the sound) is placed between slashes: /f/.

As an example of problem 3) above, consider that the English sound (phoneme) /f/ can be represented by letters (graphemes) ⟨f⟩, ⟨ff⟩, ⟨ph⟩, ⟨gh⟩, and so on; while the letter (grapheme) ⟨f⟩ can also represent the sound (phoneme) /v/ (as in the word "of"). However, in German, the grapheme ⟨v⟩ most commonly represents the phoneme /f/ whereas the German ⟨w⟩ is spoken /v/, which is an example of problem 2) when considering German versus English. An example of problem 1) above is the rolled-r in, for example, the second r in Frauengruppe... that vibrating r is not part of English.

To cope with these types of issues, the general approach over the centuries has been to change the spelling in each language to match the sounds. However, no form of spelling change can deal with the problem of sounds not used in the language, as it makes no sense for a written language to have a letter combination (grapheme) for a sound (phoneme) not used in that spoken language.

This issue is, of course, also a problem for a person learning to speak a foreign language, as frequently there are sounds needed in the new language that are not part of the learner's native language.

But, let's go back to Goltl and Tschogl, better known as Göltl and Tschögl in German.



Fritz Königshofer wrote, concerning Tschögl: As Hannes wrote, the name Tschögl is, in Austria, always spelled with the umlaut o (ö). In German lands like Austria, there is an official way to transcribe the ö, by oe. This means that most (but not all) of the times the spellings Tschögl and Tschoegl are equivalent. For instance, if you enter Tschoegl in the Austrian on-line telephone directory (www.herold.at), you will receive all Tschögl listings too. There is another spelling variation of likely the same name, i.e., Schögl.

Americans (and other non-Germans) tend to drop the umlaut dots with which they are not familiar. The damage is minor, as in most cases the other spelling is rare or non-existing. Any Burgenlaender [Ed: Burgenländer] who sees your name written as Tschogl will immediately mentally add the two dots on the o, the same way as my last name, if spelled the American way (Konigshofer), will, after an initial shock, also receive the two dots on the o.



Hannes Graf wrote in reply: Additional to Tschögl, this a Germanized Hungarian name, the original is Csögl. In the Austrian telefonbook, there are also some Csögl reported. All of the German "TSCH"-beginning names are pronounced (and written) in Hungarian as "CS," like Tschida and Csida, also the village Tschanigraben, former Csanigraben, Tschantschendorf and Csencs, and so on.

The stem of the word (Wortstamm) is the Hungarian Csög(e)l(y), the e and y became hidden. The source could be the village of Csögle, so the Csögl (Tschögl) are people from there.

The pronouncement of Ö (OE) is, in English, like "ea" in early in the morning, O is like the "O" in Oregon. You can imagine the difference.

So the pronouncement of Hungarian "Csögely" equals the German "Tschögl" equals the English "Tscheagl." I hope you don't get totally confused now.



These comments raise the question of letter substitutions between languages. In BB Newsletter 145A, November 30, 2005, "Variations in the Spelling of Burgenland Names," Gerry Berghold commented on the problem and presented a list passed on by Klaus Gerger.

Gerry wrote: Anyone who has researched Burgenland family for a few generations has undoubtedly found variations in the spelling of some family names. The further back we go, the greater the probability of change. We are well aware of phonetic spellings acquired at port of entry, spellings which changed due to language differences as German, Hungarian and Croatian priests, pastors and government officials replaced each other and spellings which changed as the umlaut and other diacritical marks were dropped in favor of English substitutes, like the "e" in the American name Muehl (Mühl). I often receive queries asking me if such spelling variations apply to a given family name, and quite often they do. Recently I was scanning some files given me by Klaus Gerger. I found a list of general changes to the spelling of local Burgenland names encountered in church and civil records as a result of the move from Hungary to Austria. I don't know who recorded them but I feel it was the work of some researcher compiling records for a research paper. They have been copied below and you may wish to apply them to your own family names. Our thanks both to Klaus and the unknown author.

If you scan the existing Burgenland phone book, you will find many of these variations. Exactly when a particular family changed the spelling can be a very important clue as to whether a family with a similar spelling is part of your family.



We bounce back to umlauts, as Fritz writes: The German language has three umlauts, Ä, Ö and Ü, which work like separate vocals. Of these, the Ä has a similar pronunciation as E in, e.g., the word "set." The difference is mostly in the written language, where ä provides consistency with the root of the word, when the root is spelled with A. Examples are "Vater" (father) which has the plural "Väter," while the word "Vetter" (male cousin) has the plural "Vettern." If one wanted to find a difference, then Ä is closer to A in pronunciation than is the E. A bit like the difference between the vocal sounds in the words "sat" and "set."

The Ö sounds like the French word bleu (blue). The sound exists in the English language as well, e.g., in the words Sir or fir, or furry.

As for the sound of Ü, I know of no equivalent in English pronunciation. It's close to U as in "put," but also close, if not closer, to I as in the words bit or bitter.

The substitutions ae for ä, oe for ö, and ue for ü are perfectly legal in German lands. A German speaker writing an e-mail in German on a computer with an American keyboard nearly always will use the umlaut substitutions. The international machine-readable part of an Austrian passport uses the substitutions, like in the case of my surname. A user searching the on-line phone book of Austria at www.herold.at for the name Goeltl will receive listings of Göltl as well as Goeltl.

The three umlauts have caused a sorting problem for indices and dictionaries / encyclopedias. I have run across three different approaches. One of these was to sort the umlaut behind the letter, i.e., ä after a, etc. Another approach was to sort the umlaut in at the position of its transcription, e.g., sort ö in at the position of oe (i.e., after od... and before of...). The third method is to sort the umlauts as if they are no umlauts. Today, this is the prevailing approach. In contrast, the Hungarians seem to sort their umlauts (short and long-barred o and u) according to the first method and, furthermore, do not seem to have the option of a transcription.

Most non-Germans are not aware of the transcription of umlauts into ae, oe and ue. If they encounter the latter, the difficulty of pronouncing German last names increases further. English speakers automatically separate the two vocals, e.g., pronounce Koenig as koh-een-ig, which is probably a worse mangling than dropping the two umlaut dots as in Konig.

When Americans read, or need to write, a name with umlauts, it is much easier to leave out the unfamiliar two dots. One of the best examples is the begin of the German anthem of 1922, "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles," where the word "über" almost invariably gets spelled "uber" in America (such as in crossword puzzles). Correct German spelling would allow only über or ueber.

What does all that mean for the family searcher? The most important consequence is that family names need to be evaluated as to whether they might have been written with umlauts in the old country. If so, or if there is a chance that there were umlauts, one needs to search in the new country for both the version with the two dots dropped and the version with transcripted umlauts. As to my surname, the Ellis Island records show 7 arrivals spelled Konigshofer versus two spelled Koenigshofer. Other examples are Poltl (30) vs. Poeltl (6), Schabhuttl (6) vs. Schabhuettl (2), or Kolndorfer (3) vs. Koelndorfer (1). An interesting case I ran across when looking for examples is the surname Benkö. There are 850 Ellis Island arrival records with the spelling Benko. However, although the name Benkö is Hungarian, there are four arrivals with the spelling Benkoe, two of which coming from Unterwart and Oberwart.

Another lesson is to be cautious when searching for a name with an umlaut in an index or encyclopedia. The first thing to establish is the manner in which the umlauts are sorted in, out of the three general ways listed above.



Another aspect of this basic problem of sounds and their spellings in different languages is the use of accents in Hungarian (though dropping those accent marks when converting to English seems to be less of a problem when compared to dropping umlauts). What I have noticed is that the Google Translate online translator is especially sensitive to the presence or absence of the accent marks in Hungarian... forget to put them in and the word or sentence may have a very different translation. For those interested in translating the occasional Hungarian phrase, note that there is a little keyboard icon in the lower left corner of the Google Translate input box. Click it and you'll get a virtual keyboard where you can select the appropriate accented characters (you may need to click the virtual "shift" key to find some of them).



In passing, I will also mention what Alan Varga noted in Article 4 above. That is, that given names also change between languages... for example, George (English) = Georg (German) = György (Hungarian) = Juraj (Croatian) = Georgius (Latin), etc. We offer some tools on our Links page to help resolve these differences. Of importance, you will often find given name forms recorded in official records based on the background (ethnicity, nationality, religion) of the person writing the record, even when the family involved was not of that background. So a Hungarian record keeper might use the Hungarian form, a priest might use Latin, etc. Regardless, the given name used within the family would be of the form appropriate to the family's ethnicity.



While the above does not cover the full complexities of the orthographic issues when switching among languages, I hope it helps make you aware of some of the shifts that may have occurred in the spelling of your family names. Good hunting!

So how did I end up becoming so involved with the Burgenland Bunch? That is a story I've told before, but I'll repeat the bones of it here... the initial, core reason was to give back to those who gave to me. My Burgenland lines, Halbauer and Weiss, were the ones that seemed to defy research, with the little hard data being consistently inconsistent... they were from Germany... and Austria... and Hungary... but no more specific than that. When I pulled Social Security applications on the Weiss family, I read Budapest and @asimer and the US as birthplaces, with the eldest child claiming being born in the US! That "@" in "@asimer"? well that represents the official stamp that obliterated the first letter(s?) of that place name.

It would be Albert Schuch, an early staff member of the Burgenland Bunch, who would see a six-month-old genealogical board post from me and would suggest that "@asimer" might represent "Albértkázmérpuszta, Austria-Hungary." His conjecture would prove correct and eventually lead me to both my Weiss' and Halbauer's. Along the way, the Burgenland Bunch would provide help at every step.

When I discovered in early 2000 that the BB Surnames Page had been without an Editor for over a year, I volunteered to take the task as a bit of payback for the help the BB gave me. Then, given my computer background, as technically-oriented staff members started retiring, I started taking a bigger technical role, eventually becoming one of Gerry Berghold's trusted lieutenants. When Gerry became ill in 2008, he asked me to take on the president role, which I did. And the Newsletter Editor role... that fell to me when Hannes retired two years ago (anyone want the job?).

As to other genealogical interests, I once put a fair amount of effort into the Stearns County Minnesota GenWeb site, providing material for it, and I transcribing the 1870 Federal Census of Stearns county, making it available to the two volunteer census sites that started the original transcription efforts. I also put some effort into the neighboring Meeker County GenWeb site (Stearns is where my emigrant ancestors settled but Meeker is where I was born). Now, I gather more family data only when it is offered to me and I keep the Burgenland Bunch operating... and that is plenty enough!